Banbury U14s suffer rare loss at home

Catch up report from last week

Today we welcomed Old Leamingtonians to Bodicote. We knew they would be tough given Warwick School as part of their catchment area and that’s always going to throw up some good players

What we weren’t anticipating was perhaps our poorest performance of the season. Whilst the coaches will no doubt go into what went wrong and devise a plan to rectify it I won’t cover that here.

Well, other than to say we seemed to have forgotten the basics of both teamwork and the game. That said, there were positives.

Some individual performances were outstanding both in the forwards and the backs. If we had put it all together with some passing we would have done much better.

In the first third of the game virtually all of the possession was between our 22 and the centre line. The defending was awesome and we went in only 0-5 down.

The second third was a bit more messy as further injuries made it harder to defend but we actually spent a great deal of time within 5 of their goal line. Penalty after penalty went out way but we couldn’t make it pay. In the adult game we would have seen cards and at least one penalty try but this isn’t twickenham and the boys are still learning. Overall we gained 20 penalties (and conceded only four) but one dimensional attaching didn’t cut it.

With our two speed merchants unavailable we were badly punished and conceded three scores to the same runaway move. Again no excuses as at least one had been preceded by four missed tackles.

Overall. Well done to our opponents for a timely lesson which will do us well for our remaining county cup games and actually well done to our boys as well. It wasn’t pretty but it could have been much closer and I know we will learn from it.

Ps. The score is the official score from the referee. Others think it should have been 5-32 so apologies to OL if his was indeed the case.